


The Taste of an Unripe Persimmon

by foxghost



Category: Finder no Hyouteki | Finder Series
Genre: Canon Compliant, Expanded Universe, Finder no Souen, Friendship, M/M, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-16
Updated: 2018-02-16
Packaged: 2019-03-19 12:55:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 17,417
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13704891
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foxghost/pseuds/foxghost
Summary: Asami and Yoh, from the moment they meet to the moment they part.This is my answer to Finder no Souen, and it is canon-compliant as of time of writing.Click herefor additional, spoiler-ish warnings.Much thanks toGreen_Destinyfor the beta.When Ryuichi sees Yoh for the first time in his father's garden, it is through double panes of glass covered in delicate ferns of hoarfrost, in the interim between winter and spring of his eighth year.His father has planted cherry and plum trees on their estate, stubbornly monitoring the humidity and soil acidity to make the transplants grow in this harsh climate. And then there is at least an acre of blossom that dies in a sudden overnight blizzard, branches laden with snow as light as mounds of clouds, clean and white and beautiful to look at, yet the cold of it bruises the flowers, darkens each heart-shaped petal, and turns water into sharp, biting crystals.





	The Taste of an Unripe Persimmon

**Author's Note:**

> 渋い (Shibui) : Lit. The taste of an unripe persimmon; the very opposite of sweet. The esthetic of simple, unobtrusive beauty that lies in the resolution of opposites.
> 
> There is a list of 花言葉 hanakotoba (Japanese flower language) in the end notes.

When Ryuichi sees Yoh for the first time in his father's garden, it is through double panes of glass covered in delicate ferns of hoarfrost, in the interim between winter and spring of his eighth year.

His father has planted cherry and plum trees on their estate, stubbornly monitoring the humidity and soil acidity to make the transplants grow in this harsh climate. And then there is at least an acre of blossom that dies in a sudden overnight blizzard, branches laden with snow as light as mounds of clouds, clean and white and beautiful to look at, yet the cold of it bruises the flowers, darkens each heart-shaped petal, and turns water into sharp, biting crystals.

Ryuichi watches from the library's windows and sees a boy being led by his father, his clothes ragged and grimy; two pale lines of skin cut sharp down his cheeks through the dirt thick as soot in a chimney, and his bare, reddened feet trod through a thick layer of frozen plum petals as his hand grips tight, looking small over father's fingers.

The boy must be cold, and yet he does not shiver. When father speaks to him he smiles, his dark eyes shining with unabashed adoring worship, all the shadows on his face chased away until he seems to glow.

* * *

It is not until later, until after the boy has been washed and clothed and given a new haircut, that Ryuichi would officially meet him. His eyes are dark still and the perfection of his snow pale skin and raven hair looms until Ryuichi spots a deep cut over his left eyebrow crossed with sutures, a cut so deep it will one day become a scar.

Upon bringing him the new boy, his father tells him, "This is Yoh. You just started your Mandarin lessons, so you'll be needing a conversation partner - and he's your double as well."

Ryuichi bows at his father, formal in the face of an unexpected gift lacking in an explanation. But his father is smiling down at the silent, polite boy shyly biting his lip, and Ryuichi doesn't get to learn what a 'double' is until a year later.

Yoh bows stiffly, like he's never done it before; his smile is unforced, lopsided, and the asymmetricality of it balances well with his cut, forming a strange perfection that Ryuichi has read bout, like the unfurling of bluebells or the closing of cosmos, ethereal fairies of dawn and twilight that eludes, and Ryuichi is nearly overcome with the urge to reach out and touch the corner of Yoh's mouth.

Instead, he bows back, at the exact angle required for a new meeting of someone lower than himself, shallow and with eyes forward, hands flat and pointed down at his sides.

* * *

Yoh doesn't speak a single word of Japanese, and Ryuichi is forced to mime and point along with the tutors until the quick syllables begin to stick, extrinsic to the slow careful sing-song tones of Mandarin and Cantonese in which Yoh is fluent. Neither brilliant nor talented nor a particularly fast learner, Yoh doesn't make a good playmate for a precocious child like Ryuichi, and Ryuichi himself has little idea as to why father has chosen this boy and not any other. But Yoh is quiet and blends into a room like a simple, plain tea bowl, and Ryuichi finds himself spending much of his spare time reading by his side, studying by his side, and lying silently by his side on freshly cut grass, Yoh's presence like the leaves of his namesake, inoffensive, ordinary, necessary.

Father plants a new patch of camellia japonica by the walls, in yellow and white and soft pink, the petals arranged uncannily stacked and tight, and Yoh trails after him in the evenings, hand tucked soft in father's, utterly entranced as they walk between the fresh young seedlings.

Ryuichi looks on and wonders why Yoh would revere a father this much.

"Where are your parents?" Ryuichi asks over the edge of his book.

"In this country," Yoh answers, not stirring from the lines he's reading.

Ryuichi abandons his book in short, closely shorn grass, in the shade of the now green trees, blossoms gone and forgotten, covered in tiny cherries as summer brings its dry heat and the birds perch in their branches. The boy with the frost-bitten feet are gone too and this boy now lives in his place: dressed in the same shirt and slacks as Ryuichi, with glossy jet-black hair and dark, fathomless eyes. When the light hits him just right, Yoh has the sharp eyes and corners of his father's face.

Yoh feels as common as his name; Ryuichi thinks he may prefer it.

"Did they sell you?" Ryuichi asks, in the cruel way of children, without regard for whatever hurt they may bring, "Did your parents give you to my father for money?"

"Yes," Yoh says, gaze firmly scanning the lines in his book.

"Aren't you angry?' Ryuichi pushes the corner of Yoh's book, barging into his personal space.

"No point," Yoh answers, and he leaves the book exactly where it is, where Ryuichi's pushed it, and continues to follow the words with his eyes.

Ryuichi has never let his curiosity take him beyond an encyclopaedia, but now he befriends the kitchen staff and the servants, in pursuit of all the information he can't dig out of his new study partner.

Their days are slotted, a weekly calendar filled to the brim: calligraphy, Aikido, Mandarin, Japanese, English, Judo, target practice, math, French - Yoh tries his best to catch up in all of them, working harder to make up for being far less talented; Ryuichi is left with plenty of free time alone to wheedle at everyone for clues.

What he realises is that sometimes, it is better not to know things, since Yoh's parents had been smuggled into the country on a boat with three children, and Yoh is payment for their passage. Ryuichi isn't sure what to do with this information; he is an insightful child and he knows the words 'human trafficking' and he's not sure how he feels that his father has a hand in such a sordid business, but he's eight and the world is far and out of reach, he can only care about close things - an engraved pen his father has given him, an ornamental fan sent from his mother, and now Yoh. And so, Ryuichi goes on caring only about the one boy and not the many.

The boys turn nine together because Yoh doesn't have a birthday, and he adopts Ryuichi's as readily as he adopts his way of dress and the way Ryuichi wears his hair. Ryuichi is left to wonder if Yoh has a last name, or if it has been discarded like an old shell, left behind like the clothes he wore and the shoes he lost as he was passed along to his father as merchandise.

* * *

His feelings for Yoh has always been proprietary, the same monopolising zeal he holds for everything that comprised of his room, his space, but he never thinks about it, not until he finds fresh bruises blooming over Yoh's wrists. The way his feelings lances hot and flowing down his throat and into his chest is like lava, and Ryuichi becomes nearly sick with it as Yoh holds a calligraphy brush perfectly straight, thumb and index enclosing the bamboo and the rest of his fingers guiding. The bristles sail on rice paper and petals purple up his arms.

Yoh smiles them off as an impression left behind after a brutal sparring session at first, easily explaining away the thumbprint and a pointer mark of two dark rounds on his left wrist. But father has been calling Yoh into his rooms in the evenings lately, to teach him Shōgi and Go, the games Ryuichi knows well, plays well but has no patience to teach.

Ryuichi is young but deadly acute.

The bruises grow up Yoh's arms like willowy branches of wisteria flowers, the purpling multiplying by the day, an adult's wordless guilt.

Yoh tells him nothing - not even giving Ryuichi excuses as the excuses grow weaker.

Ryuichi is reduced to curling up behind a sack of flour in the pantry like a mouse, only because the sack of rice is easily his own weight and impossible to budge. Out of curiosity and the boredom of being alone and too afraid to come to the worst conclusions, he's eavesdropping on the kitchen staff. It takes at least twenty minutes of numbness inducing backtalk before the conversation drifts to the boy the master has taken such a liking to, another five before they get to the dregs of the matter.

The head cook, whom everyone just calls Cook, is the one to begin. "We should put a little something aside for Yoh. It looks like he'll be missing dinner again."

"The poor boy. Have you see his arms lately? A shame, what he has to put up with." It's a woman's voice, very young, probably Emma, one of the serving maids.

"It's better than starving in the streets," says Cook.

"Well, it's not natural," says Probably Emma, and Ryuichi hears the sound of plates and food being moved, likely putting aside an ample serving of the staff meal for Yoh. "His parents would have never entrusted him with us if they knew."

"Entrusted, why that's a very nice word for -" a third voice joins in, this one younger and someone Ryuichi does not recognise.

"That's quite enough," Cook cuts them off mid-sentence. "Take that tray to the young master's room; see if he hasn't run off somewhere again."

Ryuichi waits until dinner is served and breakfast is prepped, past the time his dinner gets cold, but he leaves the kitchen, brushing flour off his trousers, with what he needs: a burning rage and a sense of purpose, both strange sensations rarely named, leaving him shaking all over. He crams down dinner, every bite feeling like a fishbone in his throat, but his hands are trembling and he swallows each bite with vain hope that it would settle more than his stomach.

From after dinner until long after, Ryuichi waits in a bend in the hallway down from his father's room with a clear view of the door, until the sun has set and its rays has long gone behind their field of fruiting trees with branches picked clean by birds, until the moon has risen halfway and he is nodding off on the hardwood floor, hugging his knees.

Finally father comes out carrying Yoh in his arms, Yoh's head bundled up close to father's chest, and Ryuichi nearly stumbles, shaking the pins and needles out of his ankles, making enough noise for father to turn around and shush him, soundlessly shaping the word.

Ryuichi bows deep, properly, before saying quietly, "Father, I need to speak to you."

"What is it? We don't want to wake Yoh," Asami says just as quietly, the sheer height and bulk of him making the bundle in his arms look so small and fragile Ryuichi could weep.

Knowing that his father respects perfection and competence, all the tricks of keeping his emotions in check, Ryuichi straightens his back while meeting Asami's eyes and asks, "I would like a meeting with you."

The smile his father gives him is bordering on indulgent. "Are you perhaps wanting to spend more time with me?"

Ryuichi breathes in and counts to three, breathing out, though that does not slow his heart at all. "I would not presume to take up your time unnecessarily, sir. I am requesting a business meeting."

"Ah," Asami says, his features flattening out to something less fatherly, and yet not quite business like either; Ryuichi can't quite read it but he has a feeling, an instinct telling him that father is trying very hard not to laugh. "I'll have to ask you to call my secretary in the morning, then, and see if she can find some time in the afternoon for you."

"Thank you, sir." Ryuichi bows and keeps his eyes on the floor with his hands fisted at his side, and they do not betray their trembling, not until his father is well out of sight.

* * *

It is strikingly more difficult to play at stiff formality with the young woman who gives him salt water taffy whenever he visits the office, but he books a thirty minute appointment and Sumie pencils him in for four o'clock sharp, reminding Ryuichi to dress for the occasion as though he's only six, and not the ripe old age of nine, but he thanks her so very much for the reminder knowing his father's likely listening in.

Ryuichi isn't short, and he's had plenty of practice standing up to other adults, but he's never stood up to his own father and doesn't know anyone who has and lived to tell the tale. This is not an ideal mindset, he reminds himself: it's possibly the first important, self-appointed task he's undertaking in his still very short life, and being the first makes it the most important.

Japanese maple decorates the sparse garden of the estate's front facade, their planned asymmetrical harmony beginning to turn yellow and fiery red as they fall across his path, trodden into the dried, stringy hay grass of autumn. Ryuichi nearly slips on the front steps as he approaches the waiting car, and being not at all superstitious, he does not take it as a bad omen.

"And where are we heading today, Ryuichi-sama?" his driver asks.

Ryuichi is not a child today; he will not be visiting his father, but rather the head of their organisation, so he gives the full address and asks his driver to please wait with the car and to pick him up by five-thirty. When Sumie offers him candy, he refuses politely, and as he sits in the receptionist's office, he thinks of the way Yoh draws an ensō: a nearly ideal open circle, arm extended, brush perfectly perpendicular to the rice paper, father's previously innocuous, indulgent smile as he examines the brush stroke now seeming decidedly predatory and monstrous above.

Asami has never been close to his son, but Ryuichi does treasure vague memories of riding on his father's shoulders, a small hand clutching at hair too tightly, without hearing a word of complaint, one arm stretching out to collect a sprig of plum blossoms. Now the memory has gone the way of those same fugacious petals, wilted, dried out, grounded to dust by time.

Ryuichi knows not to mince words when the meeting begins, for if there is one thing his father abhors, it would be people wasting his time. "Does Yoh belong to me, sir?"

"Technically, he belongs to our family, a lived-in servant - he's your double, and his job is to protect you," Asami says, chin resting on his steepled fingers, thoughtful. "Mostly, he belongs to himself."

Ryuichi stares at his father's hands and sees in his mind the canopy of wisteria growing over an artificial lake on the far side of the estate. "Can't he belong to me?"

"Are you asking me to make Yoh your subordinate?" His father smiles, but his eyes are narrowing, and the slight turn of his head, mocking. "I would suggest someone more suited to the task. We should only be choosing one once you're initiated, and it should be someone from one of the families that has worked for us for generations."

"For now," Ryuichi says, standing firm. "I only want Yoh."

"Son, there is this thing we call history and tradition, and for your first subordinate you must choose a son from one of the major families - probably the Kirishima family. Unless -" and Asami thinks for a moment, or at least pretends a pretty good approximation of it, as his arms fold flat to the table and he taps once on the vanished surface. "Unless we have one of them adopt him."

"No." It is unreasonable of him, he knows, but Yoh taking on a last name feels wrong, feels like he would then belong to someone else. "Unless you want to."

"Again - tradition. History. I can't just have a commoner take on the Asami name."

"Just agree to have him work for me - and only me, and I get to set his schedule. Why is that so difficult?" Ryuichi asks, looking his father right in the eyes, his brows in full rictus.

"It's not."

Asami pushes away from the desk and takes slow, meandering steps around it, stopping in front of Ryuichi, his full-height towering over his son. It doesn't sound fatherly at all when he asks, "And now, Ryuichi - what will you give me for him?"

It takes all of Ryuichi's mulish strength honed through his martial arts training to not go back a step (or multiple steps) and even that is not enough; he has to draw on all the quiet moments Yoh's given him through a year at his side, a well of companionable silence beneath blossoms and greenery alike, calm and perseverance in the aftermath of pain in Yoh's every step, every raise of his brush, in the turning of his tea cup.

Ryuichi draws 'person' on his palm with his thumb, surreptitious without swallowing it, and asks, "I am just a child. What could you want from me, father?"

"You could apply yourself more in your studies."

"I do quite well - " Ryuichi tries to contradict his father and he is immediately interrupted.

"You can do better. You can work harder - in fact you can work _at all_ and do better. Right now you memorise and regurgitate without understanding, and spend far too much of your time idle." Though Asami pretends to wear a smile, a well-practiced, easy line, the crease between his eyes holds the contrast and perhaps more of the truth. "I'll have you know that Yoh works much harder than you."

"Yoh says he works hard because he is not talented," Ryuichi argues.

"He is not _as_ talented, and he works very hard to make up for it - and that is how he is surpassing you. If you want him as a subordinate, you must at least be worthy of his loyalty, no?"

Yoh has been a most unassuming child, and the tutors praise him quietly alongside Ryuichi, but Yoh has also drawn a perfect ensō that eludes Ryuichi, he is unflinching with a gun and quick and precise with their practice blades. The heat burning up Ryuichi's cheeks may actually be shame.

"Yes, sir," he agrees. This is possibly the only thing he can give father that is worthy of this trade.

"Good," Asami says, nodding, and he does not ruffle his son's hair along with the curt approval.

Ryuichi knows he is about to be dismissed as his father circles back to his seat, to settle behind his desk again with his stack of reports that awaits. But though he has what he came for, he thinks he needs that last reassurance, the tacit understanding he's only read about.

"Father, I think ... I don't like other people touching my things."

It could be the hands he's clasping tightly behind his back, fingers painfully gripping at each other to stop the trembling as he meets his father's eyes with his chin held high, but Ryuichi swears there is an electric thrum in the room, tense and dangerously incensed. It's a ringing quiet, not the hush after a blanketing flurry, nor the quiet, silent fall of petals at hanami where the footfalls are absorbed by layers of fallen blossoms. It's much more like the fraught silence after a clap of thunder - the aftermath of a gunshot or the imagined fall of a guillotine.

"I see," says Asami. After a drawn out moment of silence, he adds helpfully, "This is the time you say 'I'm glad we understand each other,' before you walk out."

Ryuichi has much to learn, only a child in mind and body, but it makes him feel younger still to follow his father's instructions to the letter, and bashful again with his bluster all spent as he meets Sumie outside the room.

She makes an offer of candy as he leaves. This time, he takes two for Yoh and none for himself.

* * *

Ryuichi cannot say that he is the smartest child he knows, but he can be very perceptive, dreadfully good at reading a room, and Yoh is not at all excited at the prospect of spending his evenings with Ryuichi instead of spending it in the rooms of the master of the house. It's all but insulting how little thanks Ryuichi gets for his trouble, as Yoh is his usual, unassuming self, even if his unassuming self is the exact kind of company Ryuichi likes: an everyday, common presence that colours everything around him in muted, soft pastels, taking on a smooth reflective patina like an old tea ceremony vessel.

Perhaps his father has been spending the bulk of his time with Yoh on Shōgi after all, because he is good, and beats Ryuichi at least half the time in their evening games.

The crush of fresh, powdery snow soon hardens into the solid days of late winter, when plum blossoms compete with snow clumps on their branches. And imperceptibly, day by day, the children grow, losing what little they had of bright-eyed innocence to the chipping and filing of rough edges, the constant refinement of miyabi.

Ryuichi watches the sky grow pale grey, heavy with rain past cherry blossom season, and dreams of the sun behind its lining with Yoh by his side; it is in the anticipation of the turning of time, the magical number of turning ten, that he finds out what having a double means.

* * *

The children have read about Japan, Ryuichi's parents' birth place, the empire of the sun, and they've read about shrine festivals, where there are food stands and games and masks and such things as other children have enjoyed, as other children have lived. It feels inherently unfair - they are young enough to still hold such a concept, at times - that they have never been, and could never be children that can partake in such a thing. Running away is neither an option nor feasible so they settle on a brief visit on a late spring festival night, location and time overheard from the servants, and cloisters themselves in Ryuichi's room to climb out the window with a length of rope Yoh stole for them out of garden storage.

It is inevitable that they would be caught, maybe wandering between the stalls and walking right into one of the servants on a night off, however it is entirely a surprise for Yoh to be the one caught, and by a stranger.

Ryuichi and Yoh are trained to react to strangers in entirely different ways: while Ryuichi is taught to run when his name is called, Yoh has learned to turn around, to look for the voice, to stall - so the young master can get away.

Two birds fly out from the nest on that night in spring, not so late in the evening, not even before the sun sets; one returns alone.

* * *

Ryuichi is kept in the dark, the way children are often kept in the dark about 'scary' things, which only serves to make them worse.

Their compound is halfway up a mountain, its many gardens behind high walls, and those walls surrounded by the woods and brooks and wildflowers in the way of old country villas, so Ryuichi is used to the quiet, the absence of city noises; but there is a hush now, like the subdued air of a funeral reception, the black velvet crush of deep red rose petals and the soft tones of one less child in the house. The servants are making up for the lack of a quiet child by speaking low, and yet, wherever Ryuichi goes, whichever hallway he chooses, there is a ringing in his head, as if each room is missing something crucial, that by its absence it has taken away his balance, making Ryuichi feel incomplete, off-kilter.

After three days of this restiveness, Ryuichi has forgotten how to be cordial, and his transgressions are being forgiven, though his father isn't looking worried at all which only serves to fill Ryuichi with rage.

He barges into father's study without knocking, and starts speaking before bowing or even walking past its threshold, "Have you found him yet?"

"Not yet," Asami says. "You need to set aside your emotions. It's not helping anyone."

Ryuichi's mouth hurts from biting the inside of his cheek, and he is having the first headache of his life as he cannot relax the muscles above his brow; it is not the fear of punishment of childhood, where one's stomach drops out and hollow at the prospect of a bamboo cane, it is real and uncontrollable worry, half of him is missing and he feels out of sorts.

But the logic in his father's words cannot be disputed, even if he feels what he feels, and so though he cannot set aside any of these ineffable emotions, he acquiesces, "Yes, sir."

The cherry blossoms have long been swept away and the camellias are in full bloom alongside fields of lavender by the time they find Yoh in a hospital at the edge of the nearest town; a full fifteen days has passed. Even at nine, Ryuichi is a tyrant, so whether or not he has father's approval (he does not) he bullies one of the guards into planning a visit.

His car is accompanied by another four, all the windows tinted, taking diverting paths all along the uneven back roads. As they drive it's noisy with the harsh buzz of walkie-talkies bursting into life, his guards leaving nothing to chance.

Ryuichi hears nothing, sees nothing, retreating into his own head as they pass clumps of erica flowers, varied in pinks and blues, their branches snagging at the wheels. There is no sound and no light, only an unfillable aching loneliness that never existed before Yoh came to him and offered his easy companionship. It has grown habitual, all his vines growing steadying and tight over Ryuichi's heart without him ever noticing.

Before Yoh, Ryuichi had a name for this feeling of being without: solitude.

* * *

Nothing's broken on Yoh: he's been whipped and slashed lightly with knives, so he's alive and thinner and covered in bandages. The people with a grudge against father that's been keeping him has been practically toying with him and the one thing that nearly killed him was self-inflicted; Yoh has a five-inch, jagged wound slashing across his left hip from climbing a fence on escaping, nearing bleeding out trekking through country roads using the glow of the town's lights as his guide.

An arrangement of peonies waft soft roses and antiseptic all the way down the hallway from the nurses' station, where tired looking women sit with red eyes, and it gets quieter still towards Yoh's private room as if the floor is lined with moss. A nurse reminds him at the door not to touch Yoh, he's been through a lot and he shrinks from the doctor's touch, but when Ryuichi walks in, it is to Yoh's welcoming, outstretched hand.

"Ryuichi-sama," Yoh greets him, skin as thin as rice paper and just as pale.

Ryuichi takes his hand, and takes comfort in the warmth of it, the knuckles red and scratched but whole. "Father's been here."

There is a vase full of tiger lilies on a dresser by the window, casting a warm orange glow, its shadows on the walls menacingly shaped like claws.

Yoh ignores the mention of Asami, though his eyes do not; they sparkle with gossamer light and obvious devotion. "You're okay. I'm glad."

"You were the one they kidnapped," Ryuichi reminds him. "Of course I'm okay."

But Yoh is unclasping his hand from Ryuichi's to lay it dry and warm on Ryuichi's cheek, his wrist, too narrow and bird-boned, lightly brushes his jaw.

Yoh notices, and points it out as no one else had, "You lost weight."

Ryuichi doesn't remember crying, only that Yoh's hand stays on him, the pad of his thumb brushing at Ryuichi's cheek ceaselessly for minutes. The new darkness in his eyes are spreading like lake dirt, eating away the pale petals of innocence, and Yoh must be so, so tired, but he does not rest his arm on the bed until Ryuichi crawl into the bed next to him, sleeping through the night for the first time in fifteen days.

* * *

Once in a while adults do tell children the truth. Yoh really isn't hurt all that badly and he gets better. Even the shadows he carries, how he startles at the merest sound, fades away within weeks.

Sometimes, when Yoh is unaware and his long sleeve white shirt pastes tight on his skin in the heat of high summer, Ryuichi catches the evidence of the unspoken of cruelty Yoh's suffered: a patch of skin permanently raised, faint pink lines fading to white, the beginning of a jagged line just visible when the shirt rides up. Ryuichi is young but he is not naive, and most men in his father's organisation are scarred by far more threatening injuries, but Yoh's are different, they're Ryuichi's sins, a mirror of what he deserved, for which he'll have to pay dearly for one day.

What Yoh wears, Ryuichi must wear too - carved in the sinews and the heart of him, chiselled into the underside of his ribcage and behind his teeth, a secret he wears in his spine and the drop in his stomach, numbered in the petals of white chrysanthemums and leaves upon each peony.

This is what having a double means: Ryuichi's mistakes are never only his own. Someone will pay for them, mercilessly burned into his fragile body so Ryuichi could never, ever forget.

Ryuichi vows to himself that he'll be more careful, that it'll not happen again.

* * *

It happens again.

This time, Yoh goes missing for three weeks.

* * *

Asami is not a man quick to anger, and his son has never heard him raise his voice. It is always with equanimity that he takes his pruning scissors to Ryuichi's overgrown branches, cutting him down to size so he would stretch honourably towards the noonday sun.

As the weeks pass, Asami grow restless, and he neglects his garden, leaving his beloved camellias to straggle into the grass, onto the walls, his voice loud on the phone heard even in the hallways, and Ryuichi learns something new: there is a side of his father that he has not seen, that he is unable to reciprocate, that only Yoh holds in his scarred hands.

Asami is furious, and Ryuichi imagines the bodies of men who would dare to take Yoh away tossed into concrete mixers, making up the foundations of one of their family's new hotels. Ryuichi spends the weeks hating being a child that can do nothing, only to sit in Yoh's empty room where the walls are undecorated and the bed is simple and small, holding onto his pillow and praying to a god that he does not believe exists.

His father pays the ransom, empties out the estate for days on end, and Asami spends too much time at the office until Yoh comes back, covered in bandages still red with fresh blood, with dead eyes that stare straight ahead. There is plaster this time over his broken bones, and when Ryuichi goes to hold his hand, Yoh doesn't show that he knows that Ryuichi is there.

Ryuichi does not try to leave the villa on his own again; not for years.

* * *

The children are still children, but they are initiated at twelve and treated as though they are not. And while they both know how to fight with fists and pantomime with blunt blades and pull the trigger on a dummy, fighting is not the same as killing and the first kill is always hard.

Ryuichi pulls through with trembling hands and slides a sharp blade across a helpless man's throat; Yoh is made for killing the way Ryuichi can't ever imagine himself, and he pulls the trigger once, execution style between the eyes, his hands steady as the man who took his bullet slumps over.

* * *

"What did you feel when you pulled that trigger?"

It's a summer night, and they lie side by side in their secret clearing behind the guesthouse in the shadow of a grove of orange lilies looking as black as india ink in damp moonlight. In the faint glow of the stars, Yoh's eyes still hold that glimmer, an understated, everyday stillness, more crystal than cut glass, and Ryuichi can almost pretend that Yoh hasn't changed; that his patina has not darkened with age and the atmosphere that settles with him wherever he goes brings peace.

"Nothing," Yoh says, turning his head to Ryuichi. His words are simple and artless enough that Ryuichi knows it to be the truth. "I didn't feel anything. You?"

Ryuichi admits in a way that he never would in front of father nor any of the other men, "I didn't want to. I kept thinking of all the ways I could avoid doing it."

"There wasn't one."

"But shouldn't we find ways to solve a problem without - without taking a life?"

"No point," Yoh says, the expression he wears shadowed and unreadable. "Asami-sama gave the order. I can think of all the solutions I want, but there is only one way to fulfill that order."

Ryuichi weaves their fingers together by touch, reflexive, the way they had done since their hands were smaller and cleaner, untainted by blood and calluses and scars - though it is only Yoh that wears their scars.

With his back flattening the grass, the horizon stretches from one end of his vision to the other, and the night sky is high and infinite with a sliver of a moon that does not hide the stars. It feels as though the only thing holding him onto the earth and stopping him from floating away is Yoh's hand, and the only anchor holding them down to the world is each other.

The sky and the earth has reversed and Ryuichi looks down into the abyss. Ryuichi is overcome by an alien vertigo, a dizzying disorientation and he is suddenly afraid. "What do you feel when you look at me?"

Yoh is quiet too long - an eternity passes before his hand tightens over Ryuichi's, reminding him that he is not alone, and the nausea of waiting passes as quickly as it began.

"It's not nothing," Yoh says, non-committal, but a hint of warmth fades in faintly like pale pinkness into the center of a camellia blossom. "But I don't know any words for it."

* * *

Ryuichi has a recurring dream on nights when they train at being killers.

It's set in the foyer of the villa, with a familiar chandelier hanging over them and the windows filtering in daylight over Yoh's broken body as he slowly, inevitably dies in Ryuichi's arms.

Ryuichi has seen plenty of death already, most of them clean, efficient, a single bullet to the back of the head or even in the case of bloody and gruesome, his father's men endeavors to make it also quick. This is neither clean nor efficient, this is dying by degrees, wheezing and breathing hard as he bleeds out, each breath shallower than the last.

In the moment before he wakes he'd realise that Yoh is no longer scarred, that every single one of them is on his own skin, and he'd wake screaming, the rips and tears in his skin pulling him apart fading to a ghostly, phantom pain upon waking.

He would look down at the insides of his arms, the backs of his hands, and marvel at how perfect and unmarred he is, and he is reminded over and over as Yoh slashes through people and empties his clip without remorse, how each scar must feel as they're drawn on his skin.

* * *

In the way of morbid teenagers, they kept count, a bit of competition between friends to make the killing easier, but the numbers became staggering soon enough, and the game got old fast. Some time after they lose count of just how many lives they've each taken, Yoh freezes mid-mission, drops his gun after all the bullets miss its target and sinks to the floor like a broken doll.

The mission's at a vacation home with a wild and unkempt garden, full of decade-old rhododendron bushes sprouting purples and pinks and bright saturated colours - blindingly loud with their bouquets of blossoms. The order is simple and downright savage: capture the master of the house and drag everyone else they find, whatever family he has and all the servants, to execute in front of him.

Yoh took the order without a change in expression and Ryuichi feels his stomach drop out but he is in training still and this is all part of it, training that deadens them both to blood and death and the hesitation of pulling a trigger.

Ryuichi can't say he's seen Yoh hesitate, not once, not the way Ryuichi wavers, unsure of his aim as he tries to disarm and misses instead; he prefers the blade, bloody and yet somehow less final. It surprises him - no, alarms him - to see Yoh cringe and shrink away from this man leaning over the railing from the mezzanine.

The man is normal looking enough: shark blue eyes, hair the colour of hay, wearing the usual predatory smile of an armed, dangerous man.

"Well, I'll be. I didn't think the great Asami would actually send children to do an assassin's job." And his eyes grow sharper still as they alight on Yoh. "Oh. It's you."

Ryuichi can't pinpoint the moment Yoh loses it, firing off a volley of shots that all miss, only serving to fill the air around them with dust and plaster and broken glass. Like a puppet whose strings have been cut, Yoh's all but useless on the marble floor, scrambling away over glass cutting into his hands and gulping down air, trying to keep himself from passing out.

"You're Asami's boy, aren't you. Did you miss me? You've grown up ... a little." Shark Eyes doesn't notice Ryuichi standing beneath the stairs, all his attention focused on the boy bleeding on his floor. "Don't worry. I won't kill you - I would never. You're a splitting image of your dad, you know?" His words are all saccharine of a sudden, smooth and seductive and sickening, the sticky sweet of opium. "We'll have fun, won't we -"

Bullets travel faster than emotions, and Ryuichi doesn't know when he's reached into his jacket for his Beretta, nor when he flipped the safety or when he pulled the trigger. By the time he comes to his senses he's unloaded the entire magazine into the centre of his meat target for the very first time.

Yoh's wrong. It doesn't feel like nothing. It's a rush, a giddy, heady thing in his throat that threatens to bubble up with maniacal laughter, and it claws at his chest and makes him afraid of what he's become.

Ryuichi has no words for it.

* * *

They get in trouble together for making a mess that their men had to clean up, but at least when Yoh came to he made damn sure there were no witnesses, rampaging through the building in self-recrimination with extreme prejudice, so they only get a verbal reprimand from Suoh and not, say, standing in the garden with bowls of water on their heads until dawn.

Getting yelled at by a towering giant doesn't stop Ryuichi from storming into his father's study after hours, still covered in plaster dust and blood splatter, still febrile and livid. "You set us up."

Asami's sitting behind his desk looking as composed as an oak tree with a stack of folders and his pen never stopping as he says, "Is this any way to speak to your father."

"You wanted me to use a gun - well, I did. Are you satisfied?" Ryuichi spits fire. It is the first time out of the many in his life that Ryuichi realises shooting an entire magazine into a man's chest can sometimes not feel like enough justice, but this is not his target - it's obviously Yoh's.

"Am I ... satisfied," Asami repeats his son's words, looking genuinely puzzled. "The target is dead. That is all I need to satisfy me."

"Well, I shot him."

"And? He's not the first man you killed, is he?"

"It's the first time I did it with a gun. I couldn't before," Ryuichi admits, and the words sticks in his throat like the clawed petals of an orange lily. "Is this what you want me to become? One of your soldiers?"

"Hardly. I want you to lead. But to lead - one must first learn to follow."

A bouquet of white roses scents the study with a cloying fragrance, cut and dead in a vase and their last cries are of innocence. But Ryuichi knows there is nothing his father would not do to shape his garden. With his climate controlled greenhouses, the trellises built of bamboo, the painstaking grafting of stems unto branch, Asami would shape Ryuichi the way he has always - with meticulous pruning and the gentle coaxing of artificial light.

"Did you hire those people? The ones that kidnapped Yoh?" Ryuichi doesn't expect a straight answer either way, but asking instead of staying silent feels like the only way he can make amends.

His father glances up at him from his work with an infuriating, considering look, second knuckle brushing at the curl of his mouth as his eyes twinkle.

"Do you think me a monster, Ryuichi?"

"You sell people," Ryuichi brings up the bleeding obvious, and as the silence stretches to a minute and he knows his father is done, that there would be no answer no matter how much he rages, Ryuichi turns to leave.

"Son, I never meant for you to become numb to killing." Asami halts him with his words, and as Ryuichi stops at the door, he adds, "But as much as I have a passing affection for Yoh - I do love him like a son - I need him to be inured to it. He can't hesitate like you if he's to protect you."

"Really," Ryuichi says, his expression disbelieving as he doubts every statement. "You have a strange way of showing it."

"Our world is no camellia garden," his father sighs, waving him off. "I would be doing you both a great disservice if you grow soft."

"I was never soft," Ryuichi snaps, against all reason and past evidence. "But Yoh was."

His father's smile is pitying, but there is a shadow of something old and wistful in his gaze, and they burn shame into Ryuichi's back as he walks out of the room.

* * *

Youth is a contiguous line linking together all the points of the present, where the present is the only point in existence, and how, like eternity, it feels when you're young.

Yoh speaks again, like he used to, dry and with odd humour; the chinks in his armour are at least hidden away, and Ryuichi finds him in their off hours in the garden again walking by father as starstruck as the first time Ryuichi saw him, when he was only a child with bare feet in the snow.

The camellia by the villa's walls has climbed and grown wild, as tall as Yoh, lanky and awkward at 13, all elbows and knees and sharp cheekbones, remarkably reminiscent of father. Ryuichi grows more beautiful and perfect, as elegant and poetic as a high summer peony, the arch of his eyebrows and the cupid bow of his lips a splitting image of the mother he hasn't met in years, her likeness captured in oils above the mantelpiece in father's bedroom.

They compete in height as they compete in everything, but height isn't something one can get better at by trying, so they climb over one another like the purple wisteria over father's wooden frames and trellises, in unconscious brilliance of petals and willowy stalks. Everyone around them takes notice of the beautiful youths as they age out of ungainly adolescence, and some may show their notice more aggressively than others but none of them dare approach Ryuichi the way they approach Yoh.

Ryuichi catches Yoh sharing indolent kisses with one of the maids behind the gardening shed, his hand beneath the hem of her skirt. Not long after, he meets Yoh in the morning for routine, everyday breakfast and spots him dishevelled and sleep weary walking out of the bedroom of their firearms instructor.

"What are you doing?" Ryuichi asks, over natto and rice and a raw quail egg, and he lets the banality of familiar food ground him as time slips by too fast, like a rapidly moving brook, and Ryuichi, too rigid to drift along, feels left behind.

Yoh doesn't even bother looking up as he cracks his quail egg and stabs his chopsticks into his rice like a barbarian. "What are you talking about?"

Even the most royal flower is not impervious to flagrant errors, to grow leaves where one should not, to climb a neighbouring vine and to let oneself be choked by weeds.

Ryuichi regrets the words as soon as he says them, “Father gave you to me."

"I am aware. And I work only for you," Yoh says, looking questioningly at Ryuichi's saturnine tone but doesn't quite comprehend.

"I specifically told him that you are mine -" Ryuichi is painfully aware that he sounds like a child that’s jealous over a plaything. 

Perhaps that is the extent of his love - but all adults understand a child's love. It is always, invariably, absolute.

"And I have always been yours," says Yoh halfway through Ryuichi's outburst, turning the loud declaration meaningless. "Or did you want more than my skills? More than my loyalty?"

From the very first day Yoh has lived here he has only ever had eyes for the master of their house, stretching his limbs toward him like the camellia bush for the sun, but as he's grown wilder, stronger, and his branches grow long. Ryuichi may have stopped one person from taking cuttings, he can't stop Yoh from being so giving of himself - but he wants to, the need to possess burning through him like flames razing down autumn underbrush.

"And if I do?"

Yoh stares Ryuichi down the long line of his nose, his bangs hanging rakish over one eye, and his lips curl into the tiniest smile. "Your wish is my command," he says, and all the tension dissipates as he asks Ryuichi-sama very casually if he would please pass the soy sauce, and makes him think he may have imagined the entire conversation.

But he hasn't, and Yoh comes to him that night after the moon has risen, and lets Ryuichi press him into the large four-poster bed that has always been far too large for him, kissing him full and clumsily with too much eagerness. However new Ryuichi is at this, Yoh is practiced, yielding and soft, his scars a map that leads from one soul to another, and with the waft of lilacs blooming coming through the open windows, Ryuichi whispers promises he would never dare in the sun.

Ryuichi makes his father hire a new weapons instructor and replace a slew of servants out of sheer pettiness. And even on nights that he is tired and bloodied, when the days are too long and they fall asleep in exhaustion the moment they touch the bed, it is with linked hands beneath a single coverlet, head close and curled towards each other the way flowers spin shut and bow beneath the stars.

* * *

Other boys dream of running away to the circus, but Ryuichi falls asleep looking at Yoh, at his uncomplicated calloused hands and the stillness of his shoulders, and wants the ordinary - the everyday simplicity of being. Ryuichi is what his father wants: old fashioned refined competence, whatever imperfect core he has roped to a stake to right his spine, what straggling limbs he has cordoned, his father's hovering and cosseting making him feel entirely unlike himself - he can no longer tell what even himself is. Yet Asami allows the camellia its wild abundance, and they grow wide and peeks over the walls.

Ryuichi finds peace in the naturalness of Yoh, in the ever changing colours he brings to a room that reminds Ryuichi that he too, is alive, and not a designed, lifeless thing.

In the field, they diverge and their differences grow year by year - Ryuichi becomes more precise, learns to aim with intent but not to kill, while at the same time Yoh unerringly goes for the place between the eyes or just to the left of the sternum, and aims for the heart. It makes Ryuichi reconsider his one outburst at his father, at whether Yoh has ever been soft, or did he only imagine the softness, forever linking Yoh to the plum blossoms and clouds of fresh snow of their first meeting.

Ryuichi dreams of a life without killing, without money from trading people, without nightmares. His dreams are of normality in precisely the same way other boys dream of the extraordinary, in imagery stitched together from smuggled sitcoms and movies, day fantasies of noisy, brightly lit bars, of standing behind a messy counter chatting with patrons and serving up drinks and snack foods.

It's the kind of life everyone else seems to get to live, that he doesn't, so that's what he wants. And behind all that, a formless idea of a mother living in Tokyo coelesed; she wears a kimono and lives in a traditional home with a zen garden and rocks and torii gates, all his Japanese imagery of a land he barely knows rolled up into her and all that living with her promises.

"Will you come with me when I go?" He asks Yoh as they bend toward one another in his bed, full moon streaming through high windows as their only light.

"Of course," Yoh says, his faint smile, as always, clear and candid, but there's worry in its corner, settling in a dimple. "But this time maybe you should ask your father. If you want to stay with your other parent, he may just let you go."

It is then, and only from that moment, that Ryuichi begins to suspect what Yoh knows.

* * *

Little evidence remains of the kidnapping that happened years ago, everyone involved has disappeared like cockroaches in the light, and in the case of the second kidnapping, the man whose name he never did learn got less than what he deserved, a quick fifteen bullets to the center mass. Ryuichi hits a blank wall with the servants and the men and even the tutors and trainers. Either Ryuichi is cossetted to the point of uselessness when it comes to information gathering, or Asami is just that good at burying the truth.

In the end, Ryuichi decides to rely on his wits, trying to manipulate his father into slipping up.

At 16, Ryuichi is as tall as his father, as his father's back is not as straight as it used to be, and Ryuichi doesn't feel half as intimidated without the blatant looming. Could be that the years have shored up his heart with blood like piles of mulch, hiding him in the same way it has revealed Yoh.

"You did hire those people that kidnapped Yoh," Ryuichi says to his father, mouth twisted up in a sneer. "He knows."

When his father smiles now, there are deep lines where there used to be fine, fragile things, the steepling of his fingers looking bent and tired. Asami takes time to consider his son's words, and his perpetual smile is frozen, cold, and it takes him a long time to speak - and when he does it is not to speak but to laugh.

"There is literally nothing funny about this." Ryuichi scowls, elegant eyebrows drawing together and he wishes he could look as murderous as he feels. "You asked me years ago if I think you a monster - I don't have to. You are a monster."

"He knows." Asami rubs at his temples like he has a headache, still laughing, finally shaking his head at Ryuichi in something akin to mocking, and asks, "And what do you think of that?"

"What do I think?"

"Ryuichi - if you find a loose thread, follow it to the end. Don't run half-cocked into my office demanding answers when you haven't spent any time figuring things out. I'll give you a hint - does he love me any less?"

Ryuichi snarls, lashing out at a vase of hyacinth bulbs on the desk, and it drops to the floor and suddenly there's water and broken ceramic, their jagged edges no match for his fury.

"He didn't speak for a month. He didn't even know I was there!"

"Yoh got better. Did you?"

"And then you had the gall to send us to that - house. You sent Yoh there knowing he'll break down -"

"I gave him a chance at vengeance," says Asami, with infuriating calm. "Do control your pointless emotions - think on what I just told you."

"He had a flashback. I had to - oh my god. Did you set us up to tie him to me? So he'd owe me? You're sick." Ryuichi slaps his hands down on top of his father's desk, and the words have been a long time coming, "How could you have ever, _ever_ said that you loved him like a son?"

Asami looks proud of himself - proud that he'd had a child tortured, as nonchalant about the pain he inflicts as he has grafting a flower to a branch by splitting the stem.

"I do. It's not a lie. He held my hand and walked away from his parents without looking back - and when I asked him why he didn't say goodbye to his little brothers, you know what he said?" Asami shakes his head a little, in wonder. "He said, 'No point. the sooner they forget that I exist, the better.'"

"How could you do that to him if you love him?" Ryuichi asks, not understanding at all why his father's bringing up the very distant past.

"Because he's a pragmatic soul. Because he can take it - and live." His father stares at him sharp and snaps his fingers. "Think."

"You did it to stop me from running away." And Ryuichi's mind is twisting, running through the labyrinthine garden his father planted throughout his youth. "Wait. Wait. You don't even have a predilection for children, do you? That was all an act. That was for me."

Asami spreads his hands, caught. "It worked, didn't it."

"You would rather have a son that despises you than one that doesn't do as well as you'd like?" Ryuichi thinks he's never been this angry, has never lost his temper quite like this. A vein in his temple is pulsing with a steady beat. "I'm not one of your plants! I'm not here for you to trim and weed as you see fit!"

"All children hate their parents at some point. But once I've shaped you to be what I wanted, what you are meant to be, why should I care if you hate me?"

"I'm leaving. I'm going to go live with mother. I don't want to inherit your business and I don't want to kill people on the weekends - I'm no good at this," Ryuichi says, hands balled to fists at his sides, not sure if this is anger or sadness any more than he knows what goes on in his father's head. "I've had enough."

"No. You're no good at this." His father agrees, but it doesn't sound unkind. "It isn't necessarily a bad thing."

* * *

His father agrees to their moving to Tokyo as long as they both pass the transfer exam to an elite academy, and it surprises no one when they do so easily.

Before he leaves for the airport, Asami summons him into the office and reminds him that his home will always be here, but mostly, that Ryuichi isn't nearly as sharp as he thinks he is, especially when he insists on doing everything on his own.

Asami gives a parting gift: a seed of doubt.

His smile had grown wide then, patting Ryuichi on the back for the first time in years, and he is close enough for Ryuichi to see all of the lines and grooves time has etched into his face. There are far less tomorrows than yesterdays for him now, and eternity must mean very different things to father than to his son. To Ryuichi, the present moment is forever, and he does not understand how his father could disregard the love from his children, and he doesn't ever want to understand.

Ryuichi knows he shouldn't be mad at Yoh over father's treachery, father is responsible for his own foibles, but it is in part Yoh's too - for knowing and keeping it all to himself, for sharing Ryuichi's bed and taking up residence in his heart, the roots of him taking sustenance from the darkness buried deep, daring to show pure white lotus petals above roiled ripples.

It is not the garden with which he feels a close affinity, for the flowers and the butterflies that alight on each blossom - no, he feels closer to the dirt and the mulch, layers of sediment run through with bugs and worms. Like the camellia that climbs over the walls, Yoh has grown past him, grown through him into something new and alive at the same time Ryuichi has been trimmed away, controlled into lifeless refined beauty, into pure uninspired perfection.

When they're at the airport and father has come all the way to see them off, Yoh is devoted in his last glance, a last clasp of hands, and his unwavering trust is as constant as perennials rising from thawed earth every spring. In his gaze, Ryuichi sees eternity, and does not think anyone worthy of it.

* * *

When they arrive in Tokyo, two teenage boys trailed by a legion of men in black suits, it is to an empty main house at his mother's estate and a guest house separated by a garden behind a grove of cherry and plum trees. Over a quiet, awkward dinner under the disapproving gaze of an old woman named Hanae (the housekeeper that keeps giving Ryuichi the stink eye) they learn that Ryuichi doesn't really have a mother.

A woman has given birth to him in the distant past, but this young woman doesn't want to be, or act like, a mother; she is vernal and beautiful, called on often by suitors, hasn't a line on her face and makes it plain she isn't ready for the mantle of motherhood. Ryuichi has a link to a place, to a garden full of patches of meticulously trimmed peonies and a field of freesias surrounding a series of old, well-maintained Japanese buildings, a guest house he can call home for as long as he likes, but it all feels temporary. Ryuichi unpacks his two suitcases and the room does not feel at all like home until Yoh slips past a shoji screen to sit by him; home is not a place, it is a person, one who is forever in love with someone else.

The woman he stiffly calls mother loves her garden, and in a world away his father lives surrounded by the things she loves in the hopes that one day she may change her mind, he surmises; Ryuichi doesn't want to live that sort of life at all.

"I'll stay here in the guest house, but I think we should find you some other place to live," Ryuichi tells Yoh after dinner as they prepare for bed, laying out futons in the single bedroom.

Yoh never fights decisions made for him, always having gone along with them, and how crestfallen he seems now is likely Ryuichi's imagination. "Did I do something wrong?"

Ryuichi is ready with a dozen excuses; he wants a normal life, and so Yoh is a reminder that he is the only son of a crime family complete with a subordinate willing to protect him to the death. He's already wearing all of Ryuichi's scars, already torn apart twice over, Ryuichi can't even fathom what horrors are carved on the inside of Yoh's mind because of him.

Outside of those excuses, Ryuichi only wants to tell Yoh the truth.

"This trip isn't just for me." Ryuichi's hand is firm on Yoh's shoulder, drawing him closer. "It's for you too."

Yoh is as clear as he's ever been, spring water in a simple tea cup, bottom chipped intentionally for beauty. His eyes show hurt and perhaps fear, as he says, "But I followed you here." And Ryuichi remembers that Yoh has never been alone, either.

"And what would be the point of any of it," Ryuichi leans in to close the space between them, close that last distance to press his lips to Yoh's familiar skin, to the confluence of roads and rivers of his scars where they're destined to meet. "Why did we even come here if we just end up trapping ourselves in the past?"

It is intentional blindness on his part that did not allow him to see how they've grown, and how they've grown apart. Pure mulishness and history holds them together, fragile as pins through butterfly wings with pain and obligation their only bond, and it is unlike Ryuichi to refuse to come to terms with the truth.

Yoh touches Ryuichi's cheek with a rough hand, the span of it wide, reminding Ryuichi of the underside of broad leaves, unpolished and lined - precisely where a plant breathes. He asks with a voice that breaks soft like a summer squall, "I can't protect you anymore?"

"I'm nobody here. I'm as safe as any other ordinary high school student in Tokyo," Ryuichi assures, places his hand over Yoh's, leaning into him, "I don't need protection."

Though his tears have dried up long ago, Ryuichi is not ready for Yoh's heart breaking behind the clear glass of his eyes, shattering and holding onto every piece as it rends and tears. It pains him to see Yoh this way, but a part of him is glad of it, that he has mended enough to break, and he can mend again, to break again.

"I see," Yoh says, sinking into acceptance immediately, bypassing all the stages of grief.

The sun has set and in the dark the words come easier, making it effortless to kiss Yoh again with a smile. "Live a normal life. Live for yourself."

"I don't know if that's possible," Yoh answers and his mouth curls with a lie, because what he says can't be true. "I have always lived for you."

They're in Tokyo now, so though there is a new moon, the night is just as bright as if it's full, and the stars are invisible, as elusive as what they feel. Ryuichi knows that though Yoh is scarred and flayed, he chose to love the man who tore him apart; his heart, once given, is given forever, and no matter how Ryuichi may want to push him away, Yoh is not someone he can lose.

"You'll forever be mine," Ryuichi says, resting his hands on Yoh's back as he pulls him in. "But you can be your own person, too."

When Ryuichi pushes Yoh into the futon that night, Yoh is generous and giving as he has always been. However there is a new sweetness, an honestly that comes with parting, holding onto one another outside of their father's shadow, far from the groves of flowers tended by his hands.

Ryuichi wakes when the sharp scythe of the moon is high and limns the edges of an arrangement of dahlias in their alcove, evocative of a constellation, bringing to mind the infinite. And it is in this faint gleam that he watches Yoh, tangled in the sheets, and he traces each scar, each line, each star on a well-loved body no longer in shape or colour anything like his own.

It is unseasonably warm, stifling, so Ryuichi slides opens the sliding door and a passing wind drags in a rain of plum blossom - scattering pink petals on top of the sheets.

* * *

The first week of school goes as well as he expects.

Ryuichi is a quick study and an honour student from the get go, infamous from the moment he introduces himself, and he's not sure what the whispering behind his back is about but the hush that trails him like a dark shadow is anathema to making friends. The school is full of snobby rich kids, and though technically he is one of those, he can't relate to the culture or the music or the million unspoken rules that living in Tokyo is all about, and he transferred in three quarters of the way through second year so everyone's already formed cliques and Ryuichi finds himself a speck outside of all the circles of the school's venn diagram, an odd one out.

Passing by Yoh's classroom down the hall, he sees the alternative; Yoh is already sitting with new friends, a couple of rambunctious hafu kids chatting away in Mandarin with desks parked all together at lunch hour, sealed off from the world by a common language. Ryuichi catches snippets of conversation by the door, and it's all fatuous, inconsequential small talk, the latest bands and tv shows and personalities. Yoh is listening, apt, all of his heavy, hypnotic attention lavished on these vacuous people, and as Ryuichi leaves he can't understand the appeal of listening to drivel.

Perhaps from the very start normal has always been too late for him.

* * *

Yoh finds a job in a Chinese bubble tea shop with a hundred different flavours, a new-fangled fad among the many more traditional shops lining a narrow shopping street in Ikebukuro, and moves into a flat on the second floor. It's seedy and the height of ordinary, with a living/sleeping area separated from the kitchen by nothing but a drop cloth, and in the kitchen there's a single electric stove plugged into a wall outlet that shares a splitting cable with an electric kettle, so turning them both on turns off all the lights in the house and Ryuichi finds it just amazing.

Yoh's befriended half the neighbourhood in his first two weeks, and the old couple that owns the tea shop who are renting the flat to him, treats him like a long lost son. Ryuichi doesn't know why that should ever surprise him - Yoh has always been the ‘deceptively easy to approach’ half of their strange pair despite being the far deadlier half.

They buy second-hand furniture from an old junk shop just down the street and Ryuichi helps him move in through a flight of rickety backstairs. When they realise he has forgotten to buy a lamp, a girl working the snack shop selling green onion pancakes tells them there's one in her shop's storage. Ryuichi reaches in through all the junk on a stepstool to get at it, and she makes it a gift.

"It looks like you have a new family," Ryuichi says, looking around the room full of people still, cramming the little flat with furniture and boxes and new books.

"You should come visit. Everyone here likes you," Yoh says hopefully, not holding Ryuichi's hand.

It seems to be a tacit understanding between them that some things are just not done in Japan, one of the new rules Ryuichi has had to learn, like walking on the left side of everything and having to dodge bicycles on the sidewalk.

Ryuichi hasn't been to school in three days. There is nothing they can teach him that he doesn't already know well enough to teach the subject himself, and there is a cloud of dark whispers about his name and his appearance and his demeanor; Ryuichi cannot escape his father's name. He's been avoiding Yoh at school. He doesn't want to taint him.

"It's best if I don't," Ryuichi says.

Either due to his looks or wearing his father's name, neither one a good sign, Ryuichi's found a part time job in Shinjuku already. He's learning to cook and clean and all of these things that he's never had to do before, all the minutiae of living, the trappings of independence he's been denied. Outside of father's garden, it is wild and bright and green, and Ryuichi hopes, wishes, he can belong here to thrive where flowers rightfully live. 

"I'm making a lot of friends here - a lot of connections. If you need me for anything," Yoh is saying, making a case for Ryuichi to come back.

He hopes Yoh isn't doing this for the wrong reasons, and he can't crush this niggling doubt that if it's too late for Ryuichi, it's too late for Yoh too.

But he is young, and this is an adventure if nothing else, so when he steps out amidst the noise of a room full of strangers (Yoh's newly made friends), it's with a smile.

"I know. I'll find you."

* * *

Ryuichi makes a new friend in the overhang of an altar at the shrine near the school, where he spends most of his time resting in the conversant fragrance of wildflowers he cannot name drifting among the shadows of gods.

Though he does not yet know what to make of Kuroda Shinji, his new friend is a boy in the same grade, who goes around wearing his heart on his sleeve, the shield over his soul as clear and fragile as glass, and Ryuichi finds comfort in the quiet familiarity of his presence.

But in the way of the father that he's inherited far too much of, Ryuichi judges; and in doing so he thinks Kuroda has 'victim' written all over his face, knows how to solve a problem only by sweeping it under a rug, and he must know it will catch up to him someday.

He keeps saving Kuroda from increasingly compromising situations, from increasingly dangerous people, and thinks maybe even 'normal' people have their troubles after all - they're just far less equipped to deal with it.

* * *

Under the tutelage of the bar owner, Ryuichi goes from not knowing how to crack an egg properly, getting half of it on the edge of a counter, to making a roux from flour and ghee to make curry from scratch. He makes meals for the staff and feeds Kuroda when he comes in from the cold or the heat or to hide form the gangs that haunt him.

Ryuichi has an inkling that it may be himself, that he's just a magnet for troublesome people, or maybe trouble just follows whomever he chooses to be close with, that his father's name's an eternal dark cloud over his head, but he's learning to live; his dreams, for once, feel at least plausible.

At the bar, Ryuichi tells everyone he meets that he's 18, and he learns to make acquaintances and make small talk the same way he learned how to use a gun - by mimesis, with careful observation and missing a lot before hitting the target at all, let alone the centre. As he begins to excel in this (the way he excels in everything else), Ryuichi realises that he is good at manipulation and controlling the flow of a conversation much like his father, and it vexes him for five minutes afterwards before he shrugs it off mentally. He is far from his father now, out of his grasp, and it doesn't really matter if he's good at the same things so long as he remains himself.

Ryuichi grows taller still, with no one to compete with. And the peony in his mother's garden is much the same as ones in his youth; they grow wide as his two hands put together, their flat, branching leaves soaking in all the sun, and Ryuichi knows for once that he is content.

Yet the soil he has brought, the name Asami, is what sustains him - and it is riddled with worms, and carries his father's scent.

* * *

The hyosatsu hanging proud at the door of his mother's house reads Yukimura, an old name for an old school of Ikebana, and Ryuichi is familiar with the kanji of the surname but not her given. Slowly, over months of shared dinners and very polite small talk, Ryuichi pulls together enough rapport to ask his mother for the proper writing of her name; Haruka can be written in too many ways.

Yukimura Haruka is barely into her thirties, and when Ryuichi asks if her name is written 'spring flower' or 'the fragrance of clear weather' she giggles behind her open hand like a schoolgirl.

"Nothing so pretty. It's written 'distant flower,'" she says, showing him the kanji with a finger, writing out the strokes on the table. "My parents - your grandparents - wanted something that sounded sweet but they also wanted something special."

She goes on to tell him that she was born in April, and it's very fortunate that she does love flowers and isn't allergic to any of them, can you just imagine?

His grandparents haven't shown their faces once, and judging by how young his mother is - she must have had him at 17 - and how the housekeeper is treating him like a blackfly, Ryuichi must have been the scandal they've tried to hide for the entirety of his life.

"My grandparents -" he's about to ask, but she stops him with a quick shake of her head.

"It's not you they're avoiding. It's me. Also they live in Hokkaido, so it's a long way for _old_ people to travel anyhow."

Ryuichi calls her okaa-sama until she makes him drop the honorific, and eventually manages to convince him to call her Haruka, since everything else, in her words, _is just plain weird_. Ryuichi still doesn't feel like he has a mother, but maybe he has a friend in a woman whose face he shares, even if he has never been this young and his laughter has never sounded like silver bells, so bright it is entirely unclouded, he could hope beneath all his darkness that he is also this way.

It's always been a mystery why his father's bookshelf is lined with fantasy novels unbecoming of his age or status, but his mother's rooms are full of shelves of the same. Haruka likes books about dragons, how good ultimately triumphs over evil, allegories of justice and lofty ideals wrapped up in adventurous tales, and she pushes the books on him hoping he'd be just as interested, and Ryuichi, to his credit, tries.

Above all, Haruka loves her flowers.

Every plant wilts in Haruka's hands, her name and her title as iemoto carries no magic, so despite how much she loves her garden, she entrusts the groves and bushes and trees of her estate to an old expert. Haruka coos over her gardenias and camellias as she takes evening walks with her newly acquainted son to the sound of rustling leaves and the occasional tock of the shishi-odoshi, and she recounts to him the tale of how she met Asami in this very garden, a man thrice her age and so worldly and charming she fell immediately.

Haruka walks them to the canopy of wisterias where she shared her first kiss with Ryuichi's father, and even now she is as pretty as the maiden that walked back into a painting, holding onto a sprig of fallen wisteria, their purple blossoms shuddering in the wind.

"And then I got pregnant, and my parents, well - despite doing business with the man and having made so much money with him - disapproved." Haruka's smile falls then, the effect immediate like a bluebell spinning its petals shut at twilight. "I guess he didn't love me enough."

Asami, who evidently did not love this woman enough, raised the child that is a splitting image of her, that bears little resemblance to himself, alone, surrounding them both with the garden she loves; he never married, never had an affair that Ryuichi is aware of, pouring his lifeblood into work until his face became lined with age. Every evening without fail, he walks in his garden, staring off into the distance as he weaves between her favourite flowers.

One day he will leave behind a garden full of distant flowers, and maybe an empire for Haruka's son to inherit, if he so wishes.

Ryuichi considers telling her how his father's never forgotten, but Haruka's best years are ahead of her, in the same way that his father's best years are behind him, and while neither of them has moved a centimetre, Haruka has life aplenty yet and deserves to live it all, and live it well.

"I can't imagine settling down at my age. You were so young," he says to her. "You had your whole life ahead of you. You still do. It's not too late for you to have a family"

Haruka's smile feels like a shaft of sun on his face, and her fingers are as soft and delicate as the flowers she holds, and she pats the back of his hand. "You can't choose the person you fall in love with, Ryuichi."

You can at least choose who not to fall in love with, he thinks, but Haruka is looking wistfully out into the garden in her hand-painted kimono depicting peonies in full flower, and even Ryuichi finds it sad that two people can love one another this much and live apart. His father may - not may, but most definitely - deserve to die alone, but Ryuichi is no longer a child. He knows life isn't fair and there is no justice.

Haruka will be happier by Asami's side even if he is a monster, and she, with laughter that delights, deserves to be surrounded by peonies Asami planted with his own hands, and not only the dreams they leave behind.

* * *

Ryuichi takes a long way around sometimes, walking through Chinatown hoping to catch a glimpse of Yoh.

While Ryuichi is still living out of a suitcase, rarely at school and rarely at home and spending his time between pockets of quiet tranquility he finds behind Torii gates and the bar in Shinjuku, he finds out that Yoh has made himself a part of a community, putting down roots where Ryuichi only seemed to drift along.

* * *

It takes nearly a year, but his father sends his men eventually to convince Ryuichi to go back home, their black cars and black leather shoes stamping red maple leaves into the pavement, the sidewalks a messy scattering of red, and in time for his mother's garden to bloom with yellow, regal chrysanthemums.

Ryuichi's been at school a handful of times at most, tired of the whispering behind his back within a week. He's read through the textbooks and he knows he can easily write the exam for any university. What he can't be bothered with is to sit in a classroom with people who have nothing better to do than gossip - with his classmates and their obsessions he doesn't share, he really doesn't see the point of showing up.

His father has a problem with that, the absenteeism, but to Ryuichi, going to school or going back makes no difference, they're equally useless and a waste of his time when what he wants is an extension of his evening job. He's still no good at being close, having made only one friend, but he cares about that one friend and he cares about his mother. Talking with her grounds him, makes him feel a connection to something earthly, living, and human.

Tokyo is enough to make him want to stay, even with its opaque rules.

Ryuichi smokes with the men in the back alley behind the bar and convinces them that he's doing fine. His stalling tactic works for weeks, until just before Christmas when Kuroda's tendency to not ever fight back or find a legitimate solution to his own snowballing problems finally catches up to him.

It's obvious by day two that Yoh's information network is much better than his, as it takes him one evening to exhaust all his contacts and barely get a lead on who's taken Kuroda, and it takes Yoh only half a day, when Ryuichi goes to him out of desperation, to find his exact location.

"You should let the police take care of this," Yoh grabs Ryuichi's hand before he could leave. "Or let me go in your stead."

Yoh's tone is raising all the red flags, setting all of Ryuichi's hair on end, but going to the police isn't an option according to Kuroda. Being the dutiful son he is, and with his father's position in mind, the only way out of this is the quiet way, the kind where Ryuichi walks into a room with a knife and nobody comes out talking.

"What's happening to him?" Ryuichi's already settled into cold, hard rage.

Yoh's grip on Ryuichi's arm only grows tighter as he shakes his head. "You don't want to know."

"All the more reason for you not to go," Ryuichi says, shaking off Yoh's hand, no time to regret the stricken expression he paints. "Do you not remember how you dealt with one sicko last time? You couldn't."

"That was five years ago. I've grown up. I'm over it," Yoh insists.

"If you freeze up in battle, you'd die. We don't have guns here - I know I can come out of this alive."

"Ryuichi-sama - this is what underlings are for. I'd die for you."

Yoh wears his bangs long these days, the fringe of it covering the small scar on his brow; his long sleeved shirts are worn year-long, a shirt buttoned all the way up, collar high to hide his scars. Ryuichi says soft and close and private even though they're the only ones in his room, "You already have. Too many times over."

Ryuichi finds Kuroda in the bare, unpainted room of a club, and seeing red, he dispatches everyone and gives each exactly what they deserve - the pointy end of his blade, quick, precise, a killing blow every time he connects, and he still doesn't know if Yoh's telling him the truth when he said he felt nothing pulling a trigger, but Ryuichi's finally found it - if anyone ever asks him how taking a life feels when taking a life is much like taking out the trash, Ryuichi has only one word for it: righteous.

* * *

Haruka is far too innocent for this; she's in love with the wrong man but he's been good at hiding blood from her, so Ryuichi brings Kuroda to the guest house on his own, calls a doctor and keeps his mother away. Mercifully, the doctor doesn't recommend a hospital, so Ryuichi makes phone calls and arrangements to hide him until everything blows over to give Kuroda time to recover.

But father is already involved, pulling strings with the DA's office, cleaning the whole thing up with the press so the 'incident' gets reported as a gang war, and Ryuichi's left with another debt to pay, which is suspicious to say the least.

"You send your men over in October and then my only friend gets kidnapped?" Ryuichi snaps over the phone. "This is far too convenient to be a coincidence."

"Still think your father a monster, I see." Asami does a good job of sounding resigned.

Unlike father, Ryuichi doesn't have to pretend anymore. "I don't have to _think_ you a monster. You know what you did."

"Think whatever you like," Asami sighs, over the oceans between them. "You never believe anything I say, anyway."

"Maybe if you stop lying -" Ryuichi realises halfway through his outburst that he is not going to get to the denouement of their history over the phone or in fact ever, and he goes back to the original purpose of the call. "Forget it. The gangs - I had to kill them."

"Our men already cleaned it up. You don't have to worry about a thing."

His dealings with father has always been transactional, and he spends a few seconds pondering how it would colour all his relationships for the rest of his life before he asks, "And what do I owe you?"

"Come home. Let me decide the next six years of your life."

"That's awfully specific."

"They're the years that will decide the rest of your life. After that - take what you need and do what you like."

"Really." Ryuichi is rightfully suspicious, "I don't have to keep the family business going?"

"Scrap what you don't like, start something new in its place. It's your garden after I die - do what you want with it."

It sounds too good to be true, too good of a deal to turn down, but that's always been the crux of his father's deals - they always seem that way from his side, and his father always gets more out of it. The devil is an excellent negotiator.

There is something else he wants though, brought to the fore by his father's words, a reminder of how very few years are left in him. However strong and healthy he seems, Asami's at an age for most people to retire. A world away from him, there is a woman standing alone in a snow-covered garden, staring out at leafless branches, still waiting for him after all these years.

"Father," Ryuichi asks, ready to bat aside any lies thrown his way. "Why doesn't Haru - mother - live with us?"

* * *

It is so cold and late it may as well be morning, and Yoh's window ledges are iced over, making the climb precarious, and it takes Ryuichi too long to go from the ground to rapping on the window twice. When he finally makes it past the window, he's nearly smothered the moment he climbs through it, wrapped in a hug so tight he can barely breathe, and that feels warm and oddly large and very much like home.

"I thought I might never see you again." Yoh's hands close tight over Ryuichi's shoulders, all warmth and rhapsodic pressure to match the slight curl of his lips.

"I was never in any real danger," Ryuichi says. His hand comes up to cup at Yoh's jaw and Yoh immediately leans into it.

Yoh's grown nearly too tall - perfect height for a bodyguard, but no longer the boy he held hands with in the night beneath the stars.

"I know that. I thought you were leaving without me."

Ryuichi didn't plan this, not in the very beginning, not when he got off the plane, but over the past year he's seen how Yoh can fit in anywhere, live anywhere, and why shouldn't he have this life that Ryuichi's always wanted?

"I am leaving without you." Ryuichi isn't sure if he's prepared enough to leave alone, but he's found himself for now, found the half of him that isn't all ruthlessly monstrous, and he knows he'll be alright alone. "But I'll be back. When I'm done with school, I think I'll live here."

Ryuichi has never seen Yoh like this: stubborn, the lines between his brows a little angry. "When is that?"

"I don't know. At least six years, maybe longer."

"What can I do?" Yoh looks brittle, his darting eyes uncertain, and Ryuichi feels an answering sadness, an inconsolable fluttering in his chest as Yoh asks, "What do you need me to do?"

 _Nothing_ , Ryuichi considers telling him, _nothing, you're free to go live your life how you want, I've negotiated your freedom,_ but it's too late. It's been too late since Yoh came back with blank eyes, maybe too late when he took father's hand and walked away from his first family. Yesterday's flowers are but today's dreams, and Yoh may play well at friendship, may have a talent for getting under your skin, but his connections are skin deep from his end and can go no farther. 

Except this: the link between them, the heart he lets Ryuichi hold - the heart he'd let father crush. Ryuichi could tell him he's free, but he'd wait, just like how Haruka has waited for too many years.

"I want you to finish high school. Go to university. Get a business degree - or whatever you like. Join the Tong. Move up the ranks as well as you can, and I know you can." Ryuichi knows the path he wants, and he knows Yoh's place in it, all the way through the map of his scars. "When I come back - when I'm Asami Ryuichi and the face of my father's organisation, you'll be my eyes and ears in the Triad."

"I can do that," says Yoh, and just like that, all his hurt's either shut away, or simply dissipates.

It's always been too late for him too if following an order is everything he needs.

Ryuichi stares at Yoh's mouth and considers kissing him, seems an appropriate action in the event of a goodbye, but it promises too much; the years in between will be colder and longer than the past year, and when they meet again they'll be wholly different people. Even now Yoh's mouth is wider, his lips thinner, he's lost the luscious softness of adolescence, and looking at him now, Ryuichi thinks he may have imagined the softness in his lips.

It feels recklessly cruel of him to drag this on any longer.

He's just about to remove himself from Yoh's flat via the window, his hand already on the latch and turning it before he says, with his back to Yoh, where his expression is only witnessed by a lightening sky, "Yoh. From now on the only thing I need from you is your loyalty."

It could have been the snow.

He's opened the window, and he's standing in a shaft of dusty light cast by street lamps, their orange glow warm. Heavy clumps of snow seem to fall out of an abyss, casting shadows only as it's enveloped by light, and as the cold hits his cheeks, Ryuichi realises that his eyes are wet. He takes in big gulps of cold air, ignoring the burning pain in his chest, the burning lump in his throat, and he does not see Yoh's hand, but it's warm and steady on his back, not pushing, not pulling him in, just a solid presence always behind him.

"You've always had my loyalty," says Yoh, voice husky and soft. "And you always will."

Ryuichi feels he owes Yoh an apology. "I'm sorry for parting you from father."

Ryuichi should feel sorry about letting all the heat out, letting snow pile up on Yoh's floor, but there's a strange brittle silence he's afraid to crack that's crept in since he said those words, a secret that’s been given a shape where it should have remained formless. Behind him, Yoh's hand tightens, gripping Ryuichi's jacket so tight he feels the fabric pulling at his neck, and Yoh drops his head to Ryuichi's shoulder where his bangs tickle at Ryuichi's jaw, and he's so warm, his presence so reassuring that Ryuichi nearly breaks down and wants Yoh to just hold him again, to feel those arms tight around him - but it's unreasonable for him to ask for more than this; he's already taken away too much.

But Yoh's always given him more - even without his ever asking.

Before he lets go, Yoh presses his hand firmly in the shadow beneath Ryuichi's left shoulder blade, a finger's width behind his heart.

"I've never had room in here for anyone but you."

When Ryuichi finally climbs out of that window and makes his way down to the first floor, he would reach up and touch his shoulder, running his fingers over where Yoh had been, but the warmth is already gone, and the wetness left behind could have been only snow.

* * *

Ryuichi doesn't spend time thinking about the lives he touches or the lives he takes along the way; there are too many. If he dwells on the past, sifts through it for nuggets of regret, he may find himself trapped. Yoh's taught him this one thing at least - there are some things in life that one can no longer do anything about, and so the answer to that is always: no point.

But when Kuroda Shinji tells him that he's made a friend forever, that he's given his heart because Ryuichi is himself, Ryuichi takes a moment to think about who he is, and realises that he finally has an answer.

* * *

As far as family goes, Ryuichi thinks his is fairly dysfunctional but the six years his father demanded of him are probably going to stay with him for the rest of his life - and they're good years.

The first few months Ryuichi gets to spend at the villa by himself with the tutors, because his parents have decided to elope (finally) and go on an extended honeymoon, which Ryuichi doesn't want to think about at all. The amount of school his tutors are managing to cram into those months is both inhuman, amnesia inducing, and bleeding impressive, so by the time Haruka and Asami return from their whirlwind reunion across Europe, Ryuichi is two credits into an Imperial Studies degree and he's mostly forgotten what they were even away for.

Haruka is effusive with stories and old books for Ryuichi when she sees him, and so effervescent and a joy to be around that the patch of overly trimmed peonies brighten as she walks among the blossoms with her love on her arm in time for high summer. She weaves between the numerous oversized flowers in her kimono and an antique parasol, looking remarkably like she walked out of a painting. Asami is quiet and doting by her side, with a smile that he never used to have tucked away in the lines crinkling his eyes.

Ryuichi is glad of her happiness. If he resents his father's, he's grown enough, and learned enough, to keep his thoughts to himself.

* * *

His father makes it to Ryuichi's graduation ceremony for his Master's in Economics at the end of those promised six years, but he's grown too frail to make it to the end of Ryuichi's choice to pursue an MBA, and so Ryuichi ends up rushing home from London for a mob funeral in time to catch the cherry blossoms blooming, scattering like snow on the grounds of the estate.

Haruka's voice is rough from crying, and she stands at her place of honour in a black kimono, but she greets Ryuichi with a smile and takes his arm when he arrives. He takes in the lachrymose set of her shoulders and the tired, tumescent eyes, and immediately promises her he'd stay the week.

Ryuichi has dealt with plenty of death already, and he doesn't think he's attached enough to this father to mourn, but he gives an adequate speech and dons his father's metaphorical mantle, meets with lawyers and makes arrangements because he is the half of the family left that isn't crying their eyes out. And he does not mourn - until he does, years later.

"I know what you're thinking," says Haruka, looking much improved already as they stand together in front of father's grave on a hill overlooking his beloved garden.

"And what am I thinking?" Ryuichi asks.

Haruka smacks him on the arm with the back of her hand, "Good riddance."

"Mother," he chides, though with a begrudging smile; she'd hit the nail right on the head.

"You were thinking it." Haruka grins up at him, mischief plain in the well of a dimple. "Your father wasn't all that bad."

"Says the woman who was seduced by him at 16," Ryuichi points out.

"I'll have you know that it was entirely the other way around." Haruka's grin grows wider as she relates, nearly giggles when Ryuichi balks at her, "Let's just say that maybe for him, you were an accident, but you were never that to me."

Ryuichi is momentarily stunned, and he looks at her with a renewed sense of awe. Haruka was raised very traditionally - homeschooled by tutors, her days divided into slots of Ikebana and tea ceremony and calligraphy, language and piano lessons punctuated by etiquette training, groomed to become the perfect hostess; all for marrying off as part of a business deal at 18, as is the fate of girls of that generation born into rich families.

He should have guessed that a woman like her, strong enough to catch and to hold father's attention for decades, would have tried to find a way to get out.

"Unfortunately, your father caved when my parents pressured him to leave. I don't regret it one bit though," she says, and father must have loved that part of her, the smarts and the willingness to do anything to reach her goal. "It made me impossible to marry off to some rich dolt. And you are - well, I'd compliment you on your looks but it'd make me sound like I'm full of myself, so."

Ryuichi is 23 now, and very much Haruka's son: from his raven hair to the elongated slant of his eyes to the lopsided smile, he's inherited all of her beauty, bordered by his father's strong jaw. He might have inherited her determination too - the propensity to take whichever road, no matter how thorny, to get a hold of what he desires.

"I'm still glad I'm far more like you than him," Ryuichi says, smiling at the person he once thought of as a friend, and now undeniably his mother. (Even if standing side by side they could pass for siblings, and he's definitely the older looking one.) "What are your plans now?"

"I will stay here until the 50th day." Haruka brushes stray petals off father's gravestone with one hand, and as if she's speaking to her dead husband, she adds, "Then I will go to France, have a series of lurid love affairs with young men, and read poetry while drifting down the Seine in boats rowed by shirtless youths as a I sigh wistfully over the falling leaves."

Ryuichi laughs, "You're terrible."

"I want to see a jealous fit when I see him again. I never did give him any cause." Haruka's fingers are gentle as she strokes over the gravestone - the same way she run her hands through father's hair even as they turned gray through his last years.

"Hopefully not any time soon," Ryuichi supplies.

"No. I will live a long life. A good life," she says, her eyes crinkling elegiac as she speaks, and it's very clear how she thinks that her life has already been good, her happiest years spent by the side of the man she's just buried. "He'll have plenty of time to miss me."

"I'm sure he does already," says Ryuichi.

"You're my favourite son," she laughs.

Ryuichi does not know why he ever compared her laughter to silver bells; she is far more like a breeze through strands of wisteria, soft and rounded, all her syllables attesting to her tenderness.

"It'd be very rude if you don't outlive me," Haruka adds. "You can be reckless. Find someone nice. Someone you want to live for."

"I'm careful enough," he counters. "And I can't say you set a good example in your choice of person to live for."

Haruka elbows him in the ribs before primly settling into a lady-like pose as if she hasn't done it at all, and Ryuichi's left to rub at the sting. "Just say, 'Yes, mother.'"

"Yes, mother." Ryuichi half rolls his eyes but the look he favours her with is affectionate, and most of that must come from her.

Haruka leans against him, tracing Asami's name, his kanji deeply etched in the stone, and with a sigh she presses her palm against the epitaph beneath in Japanese that perhaps only the couple would understand:

The peony flowers having fallen,

We part

Without regrets.

* * *

[epilogue]

His father's organisation is his garden now, so Asami liquidates most of what he finds truly objectionable and relocates all of it to Tokyo - his new home. It's pointless, of course, his childlike view of black and white has shifted to shades of grey long ago, and he knows that what he chooses not to take part of, someone else will; there will always be human traffickers, and all the cocaine and guns he moves probably hurts as many people as the number of refugees not capsizing over the pacific.

His father may have tried to shape him with schooling and overt manipulation, but it's life, and work, that's changed him the most.

When he meets Yoh again, the boy he once knew has settled into what father has always known he would become - what he's always been on the inside. Yoh is a ruthless killer, a chameleon of a spy, loyal to the core, indispensable. Ryuichi may have become too much Asami, because he's not afraid to use his old friend through a series of jobs that elevated Asami to the top of the Tokyo underworld and gave Yoh three new bullet scars.

That's what subordinates are for - they die for you.

When that seed of doubt his father planted years ago sprouts roots and leaves and blooms full in Hong Kong and Asami has to fly back to Tokyo, as close to having his tail between his legs as he's ever gotten, it's with Baishe scattered and his new trade route now a pipe dream.

It feels like penance more than anything else, meeting Yoh again in an alleyway behind a row of Tokyo waterfront warehouses to give him one last order.

"I need you to take care of a friend for me. In Hong Kong."

"That will take some maneuvering." Yoh's face is shadowed and all Ryuichi can see of him is the smoke swirling about his hand, wreathing him in a mist of dusty light. "For how long?"

"Indefinitely. Make sure he doesn't get in my way - he probably won't, but just in case." Asami considers the state he left Feilong in, and sighs as he stubs out his cigarette, saying, "Just try and ... keep him alive. Support him. In whatever he chooses to do."

Yoh seems to think for a moment at this. "You're giving me away?"

"What?" Ryuichi says, dumbfounded.

"Nevermind. Your wish is my command," and Yoh says something that he never would have years ago, when he was trailing by Asami's side. "However unreasonable that is."

Asami rests his back against the wall next to Yoh, standing side by side in silence, not needing to fill the dead air with words. In the curling smoke Yoh breathes out, in the light limning Yoh's fingers, Asami sees only hard edges and sharp panes; the flowers they used to be are barely even a dream.

"You ever got around to going to that shrine festival? The one you wanted to see as a kid?" Yoh asks suddenly, seemingly out of the blue.

"No. Too busy."

"You should go. Live a little." And as he turns to leave, he smiles, and there is still a faint echo remaining of the boy he once was - Yoh’s smile always reaches his eyes. "This scar over my left hip aches when it rains, you know."

Asami watches Yoh until he disappears around a corner, quiet as a ghost; his father used to say that Yoh reminds him that life is ever changing, that today is more auspicious than tomorrow, and waiting for perfection is a fool's errand.

Maybe he'll throw on some casual clothes and drag Kirishima to the next shrine festival. It'd be great fun - it'd drive his security staff insane.

**Author's Note:**

> You have green_destiny to thank that this got posted at all; I was quite convinced that it's terrible by the time I finished the 3rd draft, and they convinced me that it's definitely not terrible. /Thank you darling i have since learned to love it.
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> * * *
> 
> Most of my Yoh/Asami headcanon started from a single panel in volume 4, where Yoh speaks to Asami on the phone and ends the conversation with, "Yes, Asami-san." And I did a spit-take. (I was reading the Japanese tankobon raws.)
> 
> Then I went through the Taiwanese volume and realised that the translation (which is really true to the original) has Yoh use the informal "you" instead of the formal "you" that Kirishima uses when addressing Asami in person, and the only time he says Asami-sama, it's in Yoh's head, talking to himself in the extra. Which just raises all kinds of questions, and a headcanon was born.
> 
> * * *
> 
> Children are generally unreliable narrators, even if that narrator is Asami Ryuichi. He was wrong about a lot of things. I'm not going to tell you which things outright, but all the inference are there.
> 
> Here’s a list of esthetic concepts mentioned in this fic:
> 
> [Miyabi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miyabi%0A), [Shibui](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shibui), [Ensō](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ens%C5%8D)
> 
> [Fuji Musume / the Wisteria maiden](https://youtu.be/sPgtX-ljHi4) is a famous kabuki dance. Link is to a youtube video with English commentary.
> 
> “Yesterday’s flowers are today but a dream” is a line from the Noh play [Aoi no Ue / Lady Aoi.](https://www.poetrynook.com/poem/lady-aoi)
> 
> 牡丹散って  
> 心もおかず  
> 別れけり
> 
> The peony flowers having fallen / We part / without regrets
> 
> is a haiku by Tachibana Hokushi (1665-1718.)
> 
> Here's a list of 花言葉 hanakotoba (Japanese flower language) in alphabetical order:
> 
> Dahlia - forever thine  
> Erica - solitude  
> Gardenias - secret, unrequited love  
> Hyacinth (purple) -Sorrow; please forgive me  
> bluebells -gratitude, constancy  
> camellia (yellow) - longing for love  
> cherry blossom - the transience of life, wabi-sabi  
> chrysanthemum(yellow) -imperial  
> freesia - childishness  
> lavender - love, devotion, distrust  
> lilac - beauty, pride, first love  
> lily (orange) - revenge, hatred  
> lotus - far from the one he loves  
> magnolia - perseverance  
> peony - bravery (the flower of riches and honours)  
> plum blossoms - perseverance  
> rhododendron - danger
> 
> * * *
> 
> You have blanket permission to borrow this entire headcanon for whatever - just link back with a inspired by. Everything here will fit right into canon for a while yet ... until we get jossed?
> 
> Yukimura Haruka may have married Asami, but she kept her family name. Currently, she's doing exactly what she said she'd do - reading poetry on the Seine, living out of a little walk-up in Paris. She owns a studio where she teaches an ikebana class. Occasionally, when she's homesick, she flies back to the garden her husband has built her, and tells him all about the quite scandalous single life she's leading. 
> 
> One day, Asami's going to have Akihito meet her. He's been avoiding it because he just _knows_ those two will team up and bully him.
> 
> Come talk to me on tumblr if you'd like  
> [foxghost.tumblr.com](https://foxghost.tumblr.com)


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